NASA celebrates as Mars rovers keep rolling five years after touch-down

Nasa are celebrating an impressive five years spent by their two Mars rovers on the Red Planet.

Remarkably, the six-wheeled robotic geologists Spirit and its twin Opportunity are still working.

Expectations were far lower when Spirit bounced to the surface in a cocoon of airbags on January 3, 2004, followed 21 days later by Opportunity. The goal was to try to operate each solar-powered rover for at least three months.

A mosaic of frames from the navigation camera on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity looking North-East from its position on October 22nd, 2008

Before the missions were launched, Orlando Figueroa, then-director of NASA's Mars Exploration Program, had described the rovers as 'stepping stones for the rest of the decade' of Martian exploration.

Instead, they have been studying stones for half a decade.

'That's an extraordinary return of investment in these challenging budgetary times,' said Ed Weiler from NASA.

Combined, the rovers have left more than 13 miles of tracks in the Red Planet's dust and sent a quarter-million images back to Earth as their science tools have uncovered evidence that Mars was once a far wetter and warmer place than the frigid, dusty world it is now.

This April 2005 synthetic image shows the Spirit Mars Exploration Rover on the flank of 'Husband Hil'. It was produced using 'Virtual Presence in Space' technology

Dust collecting on the rovers' electricity-generating solar panels was expected to be one of the most likely ways that the little robots would die, but winds have occasionally cleaned them.

Spirit, however, has an 18-month build-up of dust and its panels were barely able to provide sufficient power during Mars' just-ended southern hemisphere winter. At one point it failed to receive commands, and its status fell to 'serious but stable' condition.

John Callas, the rover project manager at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, said in the NASA statement that the winter was a 'squeaker' for Spirit.

'We just made it through,' he said.

At this point, NASA says, either rover could fail without warning, but mission managers are pressing ahead with plans for more exploration.

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NASA celebrates as Mars rovers keep rolling five years after touch-down